Vicksburg has 230 miles of sanitary sewer lines, about 60 miles of storm drains and about 165 miles of streets. Most of that is 100 years or older and showing its age.

“People would be amazed at what’s under their feet,” North Ward Alderman Michael Mayfield said.

“Our drainage system was built in the late 1800s after the Civil War,” interim public works director Garnet Van Norman said. “As they added streets, they put in the drainage. The sanitary sewer system was put in in the early 1900s (1908, according to city maps). It still works today, but we have ground water that gets in the lines.”

Sewer and water lines in some areas are buried 30 to 40 feet deep, he said, adding, “We have a lot of old pipes.”

Some downtown streets remain paved with the bricks laid when the streets were built, he said, and some of the brick cannot be replaced.

To keep the infrastructure in shape, city officials have adopted the unofficial policy of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and respond as problems arise. The reason, they said, is the cost of replacing the old with new materials.

“There’s not enough money in the world to replace everything that needs to be fixed,” South Ward Alderman Sid Beauman said. “You don’t want to mess with that stuff too much.”

“We need to replace and repair our infrastructure, but we can do it only a little at a time,” Van Norman said, “and to do it, we would have to pass a bond issue, and the economy’s not in the right situation.”

He said a 2009 study by the city to examine the cost of replacing three main city sewer lines — the Riverside interceptor, Stouts Bayou interceptor and the Levee Street force main — put the price at $8.9 million. The Riverside and Stouts Bayou lines, which are made of clay pipe, were installed in 1908. The Levee Street main, which carries sewage to the city’s sewer treatment plant on Rifle Range Road, was installed in 1973.

Since 2000, the city has completed three major projects on its sewer and storm drain system, city sewer department superintendent Willie McCroy said.

The most recent, he said, was a $175,000 project to replace 300 feet of sewer line on Locust Street.

In 2000, McCroy said, the city paid a contractor $227,829 to replace 75 to 80 feet of sewer line in an area where Walmart is now. In 2003, he said, the city paid $647,440 to renovate the more than 100-year-old storm drains under Washington Street through downtown. Beauman said the storm drain work was included in a $5.8 million bond issue in 2003.

“What we’re doing is point repairs,” McCroy said. “When we get a call about a problem, we go and fix it. If the line is deeper than 9 feet, we have to bring in a contractor because we can’t go deeper than 9. We have a lot of pipe that is buried 10 feet or more. The line that was replaced near Walmart was buried 40 feet.”

He said city crews average three to four point repairs a year. Contractors average two at an average cost of $25,000 each.

A main cause of some of the sewer line breaks, Mayfield said, is the movement of the ground around the lines.

“That clay pipe isn’t made to flex like these newer materials like the plastic pipes, which are made to give a little,” he said. “When I get a call, regardless of the time, I worry, because I don’t know what I’ll find when I get there.

“There are times when you find a break that affects maybe 5 to 10 feet of pipe, and you end up replacing 50 feet, because the new material won’t match up with the old stuff,” he said.

Van Norman said technology has made it easier for the city to handle some of the sewer line problems without digging them up.

An example, he said is the city-purchased camera truck to survey the sewer lines.

“Before, we had to dig the lines up,” he said. “There are also things like liners that we can put in pipes to seal off leaks. We don’t always have to replace the line.”

The streets are another matter. The downtown district has many brick streets. Some were installed for aesthetics; others were paved with bricks ages ago.

“On some of the brick streets, bricks were put on a concrete slab and sand was swept in between,” Van Norman said. “When those, when bricks are damaged, we can replace those. But the brick streets on some of the streets on a slope, like South Street, we can’t replace if they’re broken.”

He said the bricks on steep hills, such as South Street between Washington and Mulberry, were installed in grout on their edges and notched to help horses pulling wagons negotiate the inclines.

“If they break, or if we have to go in and do a sewer or storm drain repair, all we can do is put concrete or asphalt over it, because we have no way to replace the brick.”

Mayfield said he believes city workers are doing a good job of keeping on top of problems from aging.

Mayor Paul Winfield, however, believes the city needs to start looking at a program to begin replacing its infrastructure.

“We’re being reactive right now,” he said. “We need to start discussing a long-term strategic plan to replace our infrastructure,” he said.

“It’s going to cost us millions of dollars,” he said, adding the project would have to be funded by a bond issue, but he declined to discuss his specific ideas.

“We need to start looking at this very soon,” he said.